I Can Crack Your App With Just A Shell (And How To Stop Me)

Next time you buy a DRM-ed book from Amazon.com, or watch a film you can not make a copy of, you can contemplate that the protection there is much better than in some Mac app.

Would that make you happier as a user ?

The way to solve this problem is to spend more time on adding more features into the frequently released newer versions of software. Cracking all the same basic reg code would get boring for a few-dollar app.

Edit: Actually, they're not very good at it, but this still won't slow them down much.

Perhaps, to people who program in higher languages this is not evident, but old assembly programmers know this stuff well. Even for the newer ASM programmers, we had Fravia+ (may he rest in peace) to teach us the ropes on reverse engineering and unprotecting 'nasty' code.

And those students of Fravia+ know something well: if it is viewable, executable, listenable on a device you own, you can do anything to it. He recommends taking what you would have put in for protections and make your program better by that much. Or prepare to protect the hell out of it (and release every day, munging the exe).

Not really necessary - https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/installation#sudo

    //do nothing

    ptrace(PT_DENY_ATTACH, 0, 0, 0);

I really have a hard time taking advice on copy protection from someone who doesn't known about ifndef.

Furthermore, PT_DENY_ATTACH won't help because any cracker worth is salt will just open the binary with an hex editor and remove the call to ptrace(). The other two tips to prevent cracking are, at best, as useless as this one.

And just in case you're wondering, those three methods are equally useless on iOS.